Book of Mormon Girl Meets Review of Baptist Guy

by Paul Harvey

What a pleasure it was this weekend to very
temporarily stop the endless rounds of academic duties – job searching, juking some assessment stats, grading (and then some), survey reporting, ad
infinitum – and sink a little while into Joanna Brooks’s engaging memoir/war
stories/reflections on her life, The Book of Mormon Girl: Stories from an American Faith. This came out
electronically originally, and has just been published in print.

But while teaching first at UT Austin and now San
Diego State, where she chairs the English department (and delivers wise advice
to some of us who face the burdennightmare tedious task wonderful opportunity of chairing
soon), and writing frequent and always insightful blog entries for Religion Dispatches and for her personal
blog/advice column Ask Mormon Girl, Joanna
has more recently turned to a new calling – to write for a more general public
on growing up as a Mormon, confronting the LDS Church as a feminist and
liberal, and learning to appreciate her story and struggles even while dealing
with the pain of her struggles.

The
Book of Mormon Girl is a book of stories, taking us through
childhood scenes (where she was a "root beer among Cokes" in Southern California), adolescent struggles, and then on to college, where, rather
than (as she expected) meeting her long-awaited husband, she ended up tearing
up her diploma in protest. She then tells about her “years in exile” from the
Church, and her more recent (partial) reconciliation with her past and her
faith.
I’m not going to try to describe the stories; you
just have to read them in her original and very powerful voice.

Further, the book is getting discussed reviewed extensively in the "Mormon archipelago" of blogs, including this piece at Common Consent, and all of these are by people with the firsthand experience and knowledge to judge, appreciate, and critique the work, as well as to compare their own personal experiences. In terms of comparing stories, I yield to their greater experience.

Rather,
throughout I kept comparing them to my stories, if I were to ever write a “Stories
from an American Faith” of growing up Southern Baptist (and don’t worry, that
ain’t going to happen). So many of the scenes she relates here were like
amped-up versions of times I remember from younger years. While Joanna and
15,000 teenage Mormons rocked around the clock in the Rose Bowl in 1985, a
story told in a wonderfully entertaining chapter, I gathered with 10,000 other
Baptist kids from across Oklahoma, Texas, and elsewhere in what was (so we
were told) the largest religious youth assembly in the country, Fall’s Creek,
in Oklahoma, and sat remarkably patiently through stifling southern Oklahoma
summer heat while charismatic preachers orated emotionally and memorably and
scores of youths came to the altar tearfully. I even played in the band (trumpet -- and execrably bad) so that
I could sit in the front (and flirt with the flute players, of course) and not
have to arrive an hour early to get a “good” seat in the hard outdoor
tabernacle pews. And that was just one week. Fall's Creek in those days annually went on for 5 weeks, with a different set of 6,000 - 9,000 kids a week. That's a lot of Southern Baptist youth. I always envied the kids from the big city churches, with their strappingly athletic volleyball teams, seemingly cosmopolitan young women, and excellent musicians.

And while Joanna tore up her BYU diploma in protest against the purge happening in those years, some of us at Oklahoma Baptist University (around 1979-1981, at the inception of the so-called "conservative resurgence" in the Southern Baptist Convention) wore T-Shirts that said "Heretic" in defense of professors who were being secretly taped by fundamentalist youth who reminded me of Nazi youth -- that was my perception then, and it remains my perception now for that matter. And the purge of Mormon feminists, related in this work with the pain that Joanna still so obviously feels, can be likened to the purge of female scholars at Baptist seminaries for a certain time in the 1980s and 1990s (and for that matter more recently, in the case of a female Hebrew professor at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary that was so despicably handled that even some Baptist conservatives spoke out against it)

And yet, all the way through, I kept thinking, no
matter what story I can think of, Joanna has one that is ten times better, like
growing up evangelical, only on steroids. Evangelicals had family times
together, but not like Mormon families. We had visionary experiences, but they
were safely kept at a distance. We talked sometimes of being embattled in a
culture, but the fact of the matter is we were
the culture, too busy drinking cokes to even know there were root beers (I think I was unaware that actual Mormons existed until the year BYU beat my beloved Sooners in football -- 1980 something, I think it was). Some of us might get made fun of occasionally (and in my youthful
self-righteousness, god knows I deserved that), but we didn’t have tracts,
books, and anti-Southern Baptist evangelists specifically out on the hustings
attacking everything about our faith. On the contrary, we were the ones attacking others. It was Friday Night Lights meets church on time.

We had plenty of missionaries, of course, but for god's sake those were special people called by God; the idea that it would be normally expected of all Baptist male youth would be unthinkable.

And then I found the explanation in the chapter “Mormons
v. Born-agains: Dance-Off, Rose Bowl, 1985” (by the way, by 1985, I was much
more likely to be found at the Greek Theater Bowl in Berkeley or Yoshi's in Oakland, at a Stevie Ray Vaughan or King Sunny Ade or Joe Henderson concert, than at a religious meeting,
but that’s a story for another day).

Joanna relates a massive gathering of Mormon youth in
the Rose Bowl, where they sang

Shall the
youth of Zion falter In defending truth and lightWhile the enemy assailethShall we shrink or shun the fight? True to the faith that our parents have cherishedTrue to the truths for which martyrs have perished.

Wow, just some years before at Fall’s Creek I
remember singing a lot of tunes such as “God is Watching is Over me,” with a
sing-song tune and incredibly simple and reassuring lyric. We didn’t have any
martyrs who had perished, and so therefore “everything is going to turn all all right.” We weren't spitting in the wind; we were enjoying the fruits of generations of Southern Baptist laborers who had created a remarkably comfortable, mostly happy religious world in which to grow up.

But then Joanna writes (reproducing her 13-year old
thoughts in first person): “I’d like to see the born-agains pull this off. I’d
like to see them muster this degree of regimentation. . . .What did these
people know about discipline and commitment”?

Hold on just a minute there, I thought; I saw an
awful lot of discipline, commitment, and regimentation at Fall’s Creek, and
among adults in the literature about the “Bold Mission Thrust” that I
remembered from my high school years, and the annual and incredibly effective
Lottie Moon Day offerings, and in the denominational machinery which pumped out
literature for the 15 million and more Southern Baptists across the country.
So, Joanna, I’ll see you and raise you one, I thought.

But then she continues (still in first-person thirteen-year-old voice):

Did they go to church at
six a.m. every morning before school like Mormon kids did? . . . Had they
drilled the stories and teachings of four – that’s right, four—books of scripture into their heads. No, just one, just the
Bible. Had they carefully sealed up tins of rice and textured vegetable protein
against the great and final days? Were they ready to live through the end
times? No, while they dreamed of being transported up into the clouds like Star
Trek, we were ready to live out the nuclear winter that would follow the second
coming of Christ, to rebuild a kingdom from the charred timbers of leveled forests. Those born agains could never do what we did. Cross the plains. Track down and
baptize our dead ancestors by the millions. Fan out all over the globe two by
two, knocking doors. Precision coordinate 15,000 teen-aged dancers. What it all
came down to was this: those born-agains were soft.

Yep: game, set, match.

She concludes the scene:

“We waved our pompoms for Godon Jump, calico
bonnets, and Bachman Turner Overdrive, and against The Godmakers [an anti-Mormon film] and the anti-Mormon stand up
comic in his rumpled khakhis. . . I waved my pompom because I was not afraid of
polygamy, sacred underwear, or the idea of eternal godhood, and neither were
the 15,000 youth in flammable sateen outfits moving in majestic precision on
the field around me. I was not the only one who believed in worlds as
numberless as the stars in the sky. Why not? Why the heck not?”

You win, Joanna – we were soft. And you win, too, in producing a collection of memories
and stories with imagery that will linger long with me.

There will be other books of Mormon stories, and
born-again stories, and memoirs from every tradition, and there will be light and happiness, and there will be blood. Joanna’s is one experience
among many – but one told with a power, grace, and humor that you will not
forget.

Comments

You're always good, but I think some sort of angelic writing spirit possessed you while you composed that post.

By the way, if the Mormons had the "born-agains" whipped, imagine where the mainline Protestants stand in the pecking order of regimentation and toughness. We Presbyterians couldn't get the idea of crossing the plains out of committee.

That's why American Presbyterians more or less invented modern academia, John, don't you think? (With some previous help from the Congregationalists, mind you). Usually we can't even cross the campus together with a plan, much less cross the plains.

Thanks for the review, Paul. As you know, I can RELATE. :) Love the flirting with the flute players, and Friday Night lights meets the church on time. "Heretic" shirts - a vague memory, I think... hmmm...I'm thinking on that. I could add my own stories of "Mission Meeting" to your missionary mention. :) The book sounds like a great addition.

Margaret, the T-shirt thing was mainly my freshman year, I believe, so would have missed you by a year. But speaking of memoirs, YOU need to write a full account of your younger years -- how many writers grow up as one in a set of triplets to a missionary family in Nigeria? Maybe just you! Get to work, Baptist girl!

thanks everyone, and paul--i definitely want a baptist guy confessional--even if it's just a short story. thank you so much for reviewing my book! if anyone wanted to use a piece of it in a class on embarrassing religious adolescent moments, or gender and religious conservatism, etc., i'd Skype right in to say hi to your students.

My students and I listened to Joanna Brooks' interview with Krista Tippett on the APM show "On Being." The course is "Religion and Public Life in America," and I paired it with our discussion of the Second Great Awakening. A really interesting, insightful way to consider Mormonism in the past and present. Highly recommended listening for everyone! Thanks, Joanna!